Afghan forces suffer setbacks

New Taliban tactics include road bombs, guerrilla attacks

David Rohde, New York Times

Published 4:00 am, Saturday, September 1, 2007

Over the past six weeks, the Taliban have driven government forces out of half of a strategic area in southern Afghanistan that U.S. and NATO officials declared a success story last fall in their campaign to clear out insurgents and make way for development programs, Afghan officials say.

A year after Canadian and U.S. forces drove hundreds of Taliban fighters from the area, the Panjwai and Zare districts southwest of Kandahar, the rebels are back and have adopted new tactics. Carrying out guerrilla attacks after NATO troops partly withdrew in July, they overran isolated police posts and are now operating in areas where they can mount attacks on Kandahar, the south's largest city.

The setback is part of this summer's bloody stalemate between NATO troops and Taliban fighters across southern Afghanistan. NATO and Afghan army soldiers can push the Taliban out of rural areas, but the Afghan police are too weak to hold the territory after the soldiers withdraw. At the same time, the Taliban are unable to take large towns and have generally mounted fewer suicide bomb attacks.

The Panjwai and Zare districts, in particular, highlight the changing nature of the fight in the south. The military operation there in September 2006 was the largest conventional battle in the country since 2002. But this year, the Taliban are avoiding set battles with NATO and instead are attacking the police and stepping up their use of roadside bombs, known as improvised explosive devices or IEDs.

"It's very seldom that we have direct engagement with the Taliban," said Brig. Gen. Guy Laroche, the commander of Canadian forces leading the NATO effort in Kandahar. "What they're going to use is IEDs."

The Taliban also wage intimidation campaigns against the population. Local officials report that one of the things that the insurgents do when they enter an area is to hang several local farmers.

NATO and American military officials have declined to release exact Taliban attack statistics, and collecting accurate information is difficult, particularly in rural Afghanistan. According to an internal U.N. tally, insurgents have set off 516 improvised explosive devices in 2007.

Reported security incidents, a broad category that includes bombings, firefights and intimidation, are up from roughly 500 a month last year to 600 a month this year, a 20 percent increase, according to the United Nations.

The increasing attacks are taking a heavy toll. At least 2,500 to 3,000 people have died in insurgency-related violence so far this year, a quarter of them civilians, according to the U.N. tally, 20 percent more than in 2006.

NATO and U.S. casualty rates are up by about 20 percent this year, to 161, according to Iraq Casualty Count, a Web site that tracks deaths in Iraq and Afghanistan. The Afghan police continue to be devastated by Taliban bombings and guerrilla strikes, with 379 killed so far this year, compared with 257 for all of 2006.

Yet the Taliban have been unable to take large towns this year and have carried out 102 suicide bombings, roughly the same number as last year, according to the United Nations. A Taliban spring offensive was predicted by many but never materialized, and Western officials say that raids by NATO and American Special Operations forces have killed dozens of senior and midlevel Taliban commanders this year.

Afghan army units have performed well, according to Western officials. The trouble has come when the army and foreign troops withdraw, leaving lightly armed Afghan police forces struggling to hold rural areas. Corruption is rampant among the police, and some units have exaggerated casualty rates or abandoned checkpoints.

Recent visits to three southern provinces revealed territorial divisions that largely resembled those of last year. In Kandahar and Helmand, the government has a strong presence in about half of each province, the local police said. And in Uruzgan province, where Dutch NATO forces focus more on development programs than on combat, the government controls the provincial capital, several district centers and little of the countryside.

The seesaw nature of the conflict is evident in Kandahar, where the local governor cites a drop in suicide bombings in the provincial capital as a sign of progress. But police and villagers bitterly complain that Canadian forces abandoned Panjwai and Zare.

Syed Aqa Saqib, Kandahar's provincial police chief, said Canadian and Afghan army forces began withdrawing from four checkpoints and two small bases in Panjwai in early July. The withdrawals coincided with the rotation of Canadian military units serving in Kandahar in August, he said.

The pullback left two Afghan police posts in Panjwai largely unprotected, he said. On Aug. 7, the Taliban attacked the posts simultaneously. For several hours, the police held them off and called for help from Canadian forces, he said, but none arrived. Sixteen policeofficers were killed.

"The Canadians didn't support them," Saqib said. "Then, we went to collect our dead."

In separate interviews, half a dozen tribal elders from Panjwai described the Taliban attacks on police posts and other new tactics. All spoke on condition of anonymity because they feared retaliation from the insurgents.

After moving through the area in large groups last summer, the Taliban now operate in bands of no more than 20. Instead of sleeping in freshly dug bunkers and trenches, they sleep in mosques and houses, apparently to avoid NATO air strikes, or, in the event of an attack to cause civilian casualties, villagers said.

Officials in Helmand and Uruzgan provinces described similar dynamics as those in Kandahar. Security improved somewhat in provincial capitals this summer, but rural areas remain no-man's lands dominated by criminal gangs and the Taliban.

In Uruzgan, Dost Muhammad Dostiyar, the counternarcotics chief, said people were waiting to see if the government and Dutch forces could reassert themselves.

"One of the big reasons the people have distanced themselves from the government is that the government only has control of the capital," he said. "The rural areas are totally under the control of the militants."